He raised his arm and pointed. In the blinding dazzle of sun on snow, she saw two small, dark figures, just rounding the curve of the trail.
Her heart rose and flooded her with a passion of thankfulness. She said, quietly, after a minute: “Yes, yes, it’s him and the doctor. Now—now, you’ll let him thank you, as you—won’t let me.”
Her words ended almost in a question, for she saw that, while she had been eating, he had taken his rifle on his arm and put on his snowshoes. Suddenly, she began to tremble a little, aware of something in his silence, his stillness, which vaguely threatened.
He swung upon her suddenly—one would have said, savagely, but that he was laughing. Those two black figures down the trail were sweeping rapidly nearer. All the latent fierceness of the man had flamed into being, at their approach. He laid a hard, slim hand on Dorette’s shoulder and turned her, so that, at less than arm’s length, she faced him. He said, softly, in the midst of his almost noiseless laughter: “I’ll show you how you can thank me.”
She looked up at him, her face colourless, her lips parted. In the shadow of the hood his eyes gleamed at her, his face bent nearer. The world fell away from her; there was nothing left in life for a minute but that face, that voice.
She just breathed: “Who are you?”
“You’ll know in a minute!” He looked swiftly from her to the two men down the trail. They were coming on fast. He seemed to be measuring his distance from them.
When they were so near that their faces were all but discernible, he caught the girl to him. She was slack in his hold; all her life seemed to be in her dazed eyes; she would have fallen, but that he held her with an arm like a steel bar. And twice and three times he kissed her.
“That’s how you can thank me!” He released her laughing still.
She staggered, her hands over her red mouth. With the movement of release he thrust her, rough and swift, within the door of the cabin. A bullet sent a spray of dusty snow over him. She saw, in one reeling instant, Garth on his knee down the trail, rifle levelled for another shot; the other, a laughing shadow, slipping from her hands, from her life, into the shadow of the forest from which he had come.